Paul Meinshausen is the CEO and co-founder of Aampe, a San Francisco company that deploys agentic AI infrastructure so consumer apps can learn from each user's behavior and adapt their messaging in real time. An anthropologist turned data scientist who started his career in US Army Intelligence, he co-founded the Indian fintech PaySense (acquired by PayU for $185M) before building Aampe with collaborators he first met in a military analysis unit. He argues that businesses win not by understanding the past but by making better decisions about the future, and that personalization should be about responsiveness rather than prediction.
Paul Puey is the CEO and co-founder of Edge, a San Diego-based self-custody crypto wallet and security platform. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate who once shipped 3D graphics at Nvidia, he caught the Bitcoin bug in 2013 and launched Airbitz in 2014, rebranding it to Edge in 2017 as crypto moved beyond Bitcoin. His pitch is stubbornly simple: if you do not hold your keys, you do not own your coins, and security belongs on the edges of the network, in your hands, not on someone else's server.
Paul Slavin is the CEO of Skillshare, the New York online-learning marketplace, a role he stepped into in August 2025. He arrived by an unusual route: 33 years at ABC News, where he ran worldwide newsgathering, executive-produced World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and collected a dozen Emmys and a Peabody before pivoting fully into digital. He went on to lead web video at Everyday Health, run the digital book publisher Open Road Integrated Media to profitability, advise on media M&A at Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, and now steers a 30,000-class platform for creative learners and teachers worldwide.
Pedro Coelho is the founder and CEO of Biorce, a Barcelona-based health AI company building software that designs and manages clinical trials in minutes instead of months. A Portuguese entrepreneur with over eight years in life sciences consulting, he started Biorce after a clinical trial bought his father, who was dying of melanoma, ten extra months of life. In February 2026 the company closed a $52M Series A led by DST Global, the largest Series A in Iberian healthtech and AI, backed by angels including the CEOs of Mistral, Revolut, OutSystems and Seedtag.
Pete Foley is a serial enterprise-software entrepreneur and the co-founder of ModelOp, the Chicago-based company that built one of the first platforms for governing AI models the way banks govern money. Over a 35-year career he has run and exited a string of infrastructure companies - Infoblox, PortAuthority (to Websense), RingCube (to Citrix), Graphite Systems (to EMC) - before betting that the hardest problem in artificial intelligence would not be building models but trusting them. He served as ModelOp's CEO from its founding and now supports the company from its board of directors.
Peter DiLaura is the CEO and Board Director of Helicore Biopharma, a San Mateo biotech building long-acting antibody-peptide conjugates that go after obesity by neutralizing the GIP hormone in the bloodstream rather than blocking its receptor. With nearly three decades of company-building behind him - CEO roles at Initial Therapeutics and Second Genome, business and strategy chief at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, and time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Third Rock Ventures - he is the operator brought in to turn a $65M Series A and a clinic-ready antibody into medicines that aim for quarterly dosing and better-quality weight loss.
Peter Martin is the co-founder, President and CEO of Siesta Medical, a Los Gatos medical device company building minimally invasive treatments for obstructive sleep apnea that need no masks and no machines. Since 2009 he has guided the company from an idea to FDA-cleared products - the Encore System, the Revolution Suture Passer and the AIRLIFT hyoid suspension procedure - that reposition the airway with two small implants and a stitch. A Duke and Stanford trained mechanical engineer, he spent 15-plus years in medical device operations before turning Siesta into one of the most-cited names in surgical sleep apnea care.
Peter Noymer is the Executive Chairman and CEO of ForCast Orthopedics, a Denver-based development-stage company building a wearable system that pumps antibiotics straight into infected artificial joints. An MIT-trained mechanical engineer with more than two decades turning lab concepts into shipped pharmaceutical and device products, he has previously run or steered ophthalmology, cardiopulmonary and digital-health ventures, several of which were acquired by Novartis, United Therapeutics and Grupo Ferrer. At ForCast he has landed FDA Orphan Drug and Qualified Infectious Disease Product designations, a Series A led by a renowned orthopedic surgeon, and a 2026 MedTech Innovator slot.
Phil Chamberlain is the co-founder, president and CEO of Neomorph, a San Diego biotech building molecular glue degraders to drug proteins long written off as untouchable. An Oxford-trained structural biologist, he spent a decade at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb decoding how thalidomide works at the atomic level, then turned that science into a company that has signed partnerships with AbbVie, Biogen and Novo Nordisk worth billions and pushed its lead degrader into the clinic.
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company putting AI data centers into orbit. In November 2025 his team flew an Nvidia H100 GPU to space aboard Starcloud-1, then trained the first large language model off-planet. Five months later the company raised a $170M Series A and became the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history. A British applied mathematician and ex-McKinsey space-agency consultant, Johnston argues the cheapest place to build a gigawatt-scale data center is no longer Earth - it is low Earth orbit, where sunlight is free and the cold of space does the cooling.
Philip Stanger is the co-founder and CEO of Olyns, a Silicon Valley startup turning recycling into a self-funding business by pairing AI-powered reverse vending 'Cubes' with retail media advertising. A classically trained musician with degrees from Johns Hopkins and Yale, he scored films before founding indoor-positioning startup Wifarer, then led Apple Maps' indoor mapping team for five years. He started Olyns in 2019 after watching wildfires and floods hit the Santa Cruz Mountains where he lives, betting that recycling fails not for lack of technology but because its business model is broken.
Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Elasticsearch-grade full-text search and analytics directly into the database, eliminating the brittle ETL pipelines companies build to sync Postgres with a separate search engine. A Harvard computer science and economics graduate raised in rural Quebec, he previously co-founded the cloud-browser startup Whist before pivoting into ParadeDB during a contracting stint. In 2025 ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with customers including Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards.
Phillip Hyun is the CEO of Gamevice, the Simi Valley hardware company (formerly Wikipad) that builds clip-on game controllers for phones and tablets, and the co-founder and vice chairman of the esports organization Gen.G. He has spent a decade running an eight-person hardware shop that has repeatedly taken Nintendo to court over the Switch's detachable controllers, a David-and-Goliath patent fight that reached the Federal Circuit in 2026. A UC Berkeley cognitive science graduate, Hyun has built and sold companies (Enterprise Technology Group to Nexstar Broadcasting), helped launch a top-tier global esports brand, and more recently turned investor in the Italian football club Venezia FC.
R. Scott Jones is the Chairman and CEO of Intravascular Imaging Incorporated (i3), a Wilton, Connecticut medtech startup commercializing a 3-French NIRF-IVUS catheter that lets cardiologists see both the anatomy and the biology of a diseased coronary artery in a single pass. A medical device operator with more than 25 years in the field, he once ran GE Medical Systems' cardiovascular business across the Americas and Asia and has steered companies from two-person startups to organizations of 7,000 employees. At i3 he is the commercial engine behind a technology born in the labs of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Technical University of Munich.
Rabih Ramadi is the co-founder and CEO of Avantos, a New York fintech building an AI-native operating system for client onboarding and servicing inside banks, asset managers, and insurers. He spent a career on the inside of financial services - technology strategy at The Bank of New York, leading capital markets as a senior partner at KPMG, then helping build Unqork from the ground floor as a founding team member and chief revenue officer - before deciding the client-service layer of finance needed to be rebuilt around a knowledge graph and AI agents. In early 2026 Avantos raised a $25 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $35 million.
Rajen Sheth is the CEO and co-founder of Kyron Learning, a public benefit company using AI to give every student access to high-quality one-on-one teaching. Before founding Kyron, he spent 17 years at Google, where he was the original product manager behind Google Apps (now Workspace), launched Chromebooks for Education, and rose to Vice President of Google Cloud AI and Industry Solutions. A Stanford-trained engineer who once pitched enterprise Gmail to Eric Schmidt and got turned down, he has built tools used by millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of students, then walked away from big tech to chase a teacher-shaped problem he has carried since sixth grade.
Randy Wang is the CEO of Wingz, a healthcare transportation marketplace that pivoted from airport rides into non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) for vulnerable populations. A UC Berkeley economist who started in investment banking at Jefferies (as its first Shanghai employee) and co-founded the Shanghai mobile-games studio Camigo Media, he now runs a network of credentialed, vetted drivers who get patients to the care they need - and lets those drivers earn with flexibility and purpose.
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Rebecca Krauthamer is the co-founder and CEO of QuSecure, a San Mateo company building software that lets governments and banks swap out their encryption before quantum computers learn to break it. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who jumped from AI to quantum in 2017, she turned a U.S. Air Force grant into a Series A-funded leader in post-quantum cryptography, counting the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Banco Sabadell among its users. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and World Economic Forum council member, she argues cybersecurity is a mission for humanity, not just a product category.
Reza Javan is the CEO and co-founder of Telescope, a London-based AI prospecting platform that automates B2B outbound across email and LinkedIn. Before he sold software to salespeople, he was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, an Oxford DPhil microbiologist who sequenced thousands of pneumococcal genomes and discovered new families of antimicrobial peptides. He swapped the lab bench for a startup at Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort, where Telescope was born in 2021. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First.
Ricardo Garcia de Alba is the President and CEO of Meiogenix, an agriculture biotech company whose chromosome-editing platform speeds up the way crops naturally reshuffle their own DNA. A chemical engineer from Mexico City turned global ag executive, he spent 15 years at Corteva Agriscience helping build and launch the Enlist weed-control system before taking the helm at Meiogenix in 2024. He pairs hard science and commercial scale with a long habit of community and STEM service - and keeps bees on the side.
Richard Gerstein is the Chairman and CEO of Cargomatic, the marketplace that matches local and regional freight with the trucks already driving past it. He grew up on the docks of his father's less-than-truckload business in Chicago, founded the multi-modal logistics software company IntelliTrans, and since 2017 has rebuilt Cargomatic into a leading provider of local LTL, drayage, and white glove freight services. He pairs a UC Berkeley transportation engineering background with a lifetime spent around loading docks.
Rick Luebbe is the CEO and co-founder of Group14 Technologies, the Woodinville, Washington company behind SCC55, a silicon-carbon battery material that boosts energy density up to 50% and enables extreme fast charging. A former Army aviation officer who flew scout helicopters in Desert Storm and later commanded an Apache attack company, he traded the cockpit for a Stanford MBA and three startups. After building B2B integrator Hubspan and selling battery-materials pioneer EnerG2 to BASF in 2016, he spun out Group14 in 2015 with co-founder Rick Costantino. The company has raised more than $1 billion, including a $463M Series D, and is building the world's largest factory for advanced silicon battery materials. His mission, stated plainly: electrify everything.
Rishabh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, a San Francisco AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized, content-native shopping experiences for direct-to-consumer and enterprise brands. A LiveRamp alum who saw Apple's privacy changes coming before most, he launched FERMÀT in late 2021 to rewire how brands sell when shoppers can no longer be tracked across the web. The company has raised roughly $86M across rounds, capped by a $45M Series B in June 2025, and counts Glossier, GNC, ILIA Beauty, BISSELL and Unilever's Olly among its customers.
Robert Mallernee is the founder and CEO of Eton Solutions, the Research Triangle Park company behind AtlasFive, an integrated, cloud-native, AI-driven platform that runs the back office for more than 1,000 of the world's wealthiest families. A CFA with three-plus decades in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, he built the software inside a real multi-family office (Eton Advisors) before spinning it out to sell to the rest of the industry. His pitch is blunt: spreadsheets are 'separate-sheets,' and the modern family office needs one system, not a hundred. In 2025 Eton closed a $58M Series C to push AtlasFive and EtonAI deeper into private equity, funds and global private banks.
Robert Ross is a medical oncologist turned biotech executive and the founding CEO of Clasp Therapeutics, a Baltimore-based clinical-stage immuno-oncology company building bispecific T cell engagers that target mutated cancer driver peptides presented by HLA with what the company calls absolute specificity. Launched in March 2024 with a $150 million Series A from Third Rock Ventures, Novo Holdings and Catalio Capital, Clasp is commercializing science from Johns Hopkins legends Bert Vogelstein and Drew Pardoll. Ross previously ran Surface Oncology through its acquisition by Coherus, led oncology at bluebird bio, and trained as a physician at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and UCSF.
Robert Smithson is the founder and CEO of Just (just.insure), a Los Angeles pay-per-mile auto insurer that prices drivers on how they actually drive instead of credit scores and zip codes. A Cambridge philosophy graduate and former fund manager, he previously built Genius Sports (sold for $280M in 2018) and the Python platform PythonAnywhere before turning telematics and AI loose on the $300-billion car-insurance market - aiming squarely at making coverage fairer for lower-income drivers.
Robert K. Weigle is a medical device and diagnostics executive with more than 25 years of experience taking healthcare products from pre-clinical research to commercial launch. He is CEO of NOW Diagnostics, an independent board member of Tenon Medical, and a former entrepreneur-in-residence at DigitalDx Ventures. He led Benvenue Medical as CEO for over a decade, raising more than $200 million and launching spine devices in two markets, and later ran saliva-based diagnostics companies focused on cancer detection. His career spans Fortune 500 names like Johnson & Johnson and Baxter as well as a string of venture-backed startups.
Bobby Farahi is the co-founder and CEO of Dolls Kill, the San Francisco alternative-fashion brand he built with his wife and co-founder Shaudi 'Shoddy' Lynn after the two met at a Los Angeles rave. A serial operator who earlier founded and sold the broadcast-monitoring company Multivision, Farahi turned a stack of foxtail keychains in an apartment into a Sequoia- and Maveron-backed e-commerce label for self-described 'misfits and miss legits.' He also invests as an angel in e-commerce and lifestyle companies.
Robin Berzin is the founder and CEO of Parsley Health, a holistic, root-cause medical practice she launched in 2016 to make functional medicine modern, data-driven, and reachable online nationwide. A Columbia-trained physician who started out chasing securities fraud as a paralegal at the U.S. Attorney's office, she co-founded the doctor-messaging app Cureatr in medical school before building Parsley into one of the largest functional medicine practices in the country. She is the author of State Change, a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, and one of Inc.'s 100 most innovative women in business.